When a beautiful plate of food hits a diner’s table, it can be a stunning thing behold. The dish sits before you in all its aromatic, well-plated glory, conjuring up romantic notions of laser-focused cooks, sequestered several rooms away in a placid kitchen where they nurture stocks and coax the skins off of roasted beets.

But the scene behind closed doors is often quite different from what you'd imagine—more Gordon Ramsayan hell kitchen than Zen monastery. For most professionals, cooking is at once a pleasure, a test of patience, and, occasionally, a raging pain in the ass. If you’re a chef, you can sometimes pawn the worst jobs off on your cooks, and if you’re a cook, you might be able to dump your least favorite tasks onto an intern or a porter. But most of the time, you are just stuck with the drudgery.

How real does it get back there? Here, we take a look at 11 of the most painful, tedious, nasty, or just plain boring kitchen jobs—all unpleasant necessities on the road to the sublime. So before devouring that pan-roasted cod fillet with tomato-braised cardoons, take a moment to toast the back of the house, who did all of the shitty work so you didn’t have to.

salad. I hate to make salad, especially in the dead of winter. you can never get your hands warm again.

Gigi

Halibut is my favorite fish…I will never eat it again!

Isleoftiki

Maybe it’s the format I’m using but I only see 8 things on this list of 11 . . . Anyway, chefs have no need to worry on my behalf. I wouldn’t eat any of these things if you paid me, except maybe the halibut. But I can live without it if it’s this much trouble!

jmacleve

The guilt! I may never eat out again!

http://twitter.com/unflattering unflattering

Thyme’s not quite that bad. You can get most of the leaves off by pinching around the stem and firmly swiping in the direction opposite the leaf growth. They often just come right off for the most part. I cook with it more after I learned this because I love the flavor, but picking it off leaf by leaf is a pain.

Jared Stone

Bahaha if I got caught picking thyme like that at work, bahaha

Abckit

What about ramps? And the thyme thing is true. I had to fill a pint container of leaves only, took forever.